The Crypto Con Woman and the Charlestown Houseboat Murder

It was nearing 11 o’clock on a February night when two Boston police officers stepped from their patrol car into the Charlestown Navy Yard. Biting winds made the 30-degree night feel even colder as they pushed toward the marina. Under a sliver of a crescent moon, the harbor lay desolate, Boston’s skyline lights dancing on the dark water.

The cops’ boots echoed off the metal gangplank as they made their way toward the only boat docked in this sector of the marina—a 75-foot luxury houseboat called the Alinea.

Right beside the boat, something bobbed in the water.

The officers were here to make a well-being check on Joseph Donohue, a silver-haired 65-year-old lawyer who was living year round on the boat. He and his ex-wife shared joint custody of Eddie, a golden retriever who every other weekend came to the houseboat to hang with Donohue’s constant sidekick, the ugly-adorable terrier, Champ. According to the report the police would write later that evening, Donohue’s family, including his ex-wife and three adult children, hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days—unusual for him—and they were worried.

They had a phone number for the woman their father was involved with, but she didn’t ease their concerns. She told them that Donohue had gone “to the store,” the police report said, but offered no further explanation. That was when Donohue’s family called the cops.

The young woman found on Joseph Donohue’s boat with his body. / Libby O’Neill / Pool

When officers knocked on the Alinea’s door around 10:45 p.m., a woman pulled it open. She was young, in her early twenties, with a dancer’s toned body, pink fingernails, and long, flowing hair. But she was jumpy—flanked by an anxious Eddie.

The woman agreed “to put the dog away,” the officers later noted in their official report. As she retreated back inside, they watched her through the houseboat windows as she frantically hurried about, “moving things around.” Her behavior was bizarre—enough so that the officers pulled open the door and shouted for her to come back.

Breathless, the woman returned to the door and asked, “How can I help you?” The officers got right to business: They were looking for a missing person—in fact, the owner of the very boat that she was aboard.

The woman stated that she had something to tell the officers, but then spun around to leave again—this time, stating that there were “too many men” and that she was uncomfortable. She tried to slam the door shut, according to the police report, but one officer jammed his foot in the entrance while they continued to question her, asking for her name.

“Hmmmm,” came the reply, before she said, “Casey.”

She told them Donohue had gone to the Golden Banana, the gentleman’s club on the Peabody end of Route 1. One officer pulled out his cell phone to call the strip club, but no one there could provide him with any information. The officers were growing concerned by the woman’s nervous behavior, the police report stated, and told her they were going to conduct a protective sweep of the boat. Despite her insisting they lacked a warrant and that they were making her anxious, one officer escorted the woman outside the Alinea so his partner could begin the search.

The officer moved inside, past a well-appointed kitchen with black countertops, toward the bedroom near the stern. Along the way, he noted cleaning materials, a mop, a bucket—and reddish-brown stains on the floor.

As he approached the primary bedroom, a black trash bag lay on the floor by the bed. A curtain blocked the view from the bedroom to a small deck. The officer yanked it back.

Outside, on the deck, was a long, heavy package wrapped in blue-and-white tarp and secured with duct tape. As he moved closer to inspect it, the officer noticed silver dumbbells tied to it with rope. And at one end of this crudely wrapped and weighted package, protruding from the plastic, were the lifeless feet of Joseph Donohue.

Donohue wasn’t the only one who police found dead that night. As more officers arrived on the scene, one scanned a flashlight across the black water off the bow of the houseboat and caught that bobbing object in the beam of light. It was Champ, Donohue’s wirehaired terrier. An autopsy would later reveal that Donohue’s beloved companion had likely been strangled before being tossed overboard into the icy waters of Boston Harbor.

As crime scene lights soon began to strobe across the marina, detectives were about to uncover far more than a simple murder.

When Joseph Donohue couldn’t be reached, police were called. / Courtesy of Donohue family

Two-and-a-half years before she was found with Donohue’s dead body on his nearly half-million-dollar houseboat, the woman who told police officers her name was Casey stood in a Seaport penthouse apartment staring out of floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the harbor. Pointing toward Charlestown, she announced to the two real estate agents showing her the $4.5 million condo that she had a friend who lived there on his boat. She would repeat this detail often during negotiations.

The woman’s real name was not, in fact, Casey, but Nora Nelson, known to friends and family as Andi. The condo she was visiting was one of 114 luxury apartments in the St. Regis Residences, an ultra-luxury, 22-floor building on Seaport Boulevard that offered butler services and a 24-hour concierge.

Nelson fell in love with Penthouse 1B—a two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath home spanning more than 1,400 square feet. According to court documents, a smaller unit on a lower floor, 5F, would be a second investment—a place for her mother, who was planning a move to Boston from down South.

Her two agents that day were among Boston’s most prestigious—Constance Brown of Sotheby’s International Realty and Cathy Angelini, the in-house agent for the development. Ordinarily, powerhouse agents like these wouldn’t take seriously a 21-year-old shopping for such expensive real estate. But Nelson had a plausible backstory: She was separated from an ailing rich husband back in her native Tennessee, plus she had a budding yet highly successful career in cryptocurrency trading and an acceptance letter from Harvard Business School. Brown remembers she also looked the part—dressed head to toe in designer clothing with a YSL handbag slung over her arm. Even so, none of that was enough to convince these experts to “sell a kid six million in real estate,” Brown says. What made the difference was the man touring the apartment with her that day. He was much older, wealthy, and well known in Boston’s elite circles. His name was Alec Stern.

Stern, a talkative man in his sixties, paunchy and balding, was a fixture at restaurants and bars in the Back Bay, where he often showed up with his Tibetan terrier in tow. An entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “Startup Success Expert,” Stern made his fortune as one of the original founders of Constant Contact, starting the email marketing company in an attic before taking it public and selling it in 2015 for $1.1 billion.

His business success had earned him accolades—including being knighted as “His Excellency, Baron of Boston of Cappadocia” by the Order of Constantine the Great and Saint Helen—but at his heart, friends say, he remained a scrappy kid from New Jersey who treated everyone around him with a workaday man’s affection. “Alec is a wonderful man. Very kind, very generous,” Brown said of the person she described as her “trusted friend and neighbor.”

Stern’s eight-year marriage had ended in divorce in 2017. “He went a little wild after that,” according to a friend who asked for anonymity for fear of social ostracization. “That’s when he developed a proclivity for, let’s say, younger women.”

Women like Nelson. Stern later stated in a police report that he and Nelson met while he was out with friends and became an item in 2021, dating on and off. It was no secret to those around him that Stern was utterly smitten with her. And it was easy to see why. “She’s beautiful, truly stunning, very polished, very well dressed. Very poised. Very believable,” Brown said.

Despite the striking age difference, Nelson could hold her own in a room with people twice her age, who were often captivated by her stories of a tough childhood in Memphis—how she graduated from the University of Maryland, where she earned a degree in computer science. During one showing, she glided across the penthouse’s wide-plank oak floors in stylish pumps, examining polished marble countertops and state-of-the-art appliances, talking about the memoir she planned to write there—From the Projects to the Penthouse. “We loved her,” Brown said. And so, it seemed, did Stern. Angelini, the other agent on the offer, remembers Stern “drooling” over Nelson when they toured the penthouse. (Stern did not return multiple requests from Boston to be interviewed, or to comment, for this story.)

Ultimately, Nelson made an offer on the two condos. On April 19, 2022, court records filed by Stern and the St. Regis’s parent company show, she entered into a purchase-and-sale agreement for the penthouse and signed another agreement for the smaller unit for $1.7 million. Ordinarily, buyers must put down 10 percent of the purchase cost to hold units at the St. Regis, but the rate was brought down to 5 percent before Stern ponied up $310,000 of his own money to hold them—even though Nelson would be the sole owner. In May, he wired the funds from his personal account, believing, he would later claim in a lawsuit, that his girlfriend would repay him.

In the lawsuit Stern would later file against Nelson and the St. Regis’s parent company, Stern claimed that Nelson assured him the money was merely a loan, necessary only because she was having temporary liquidity issues. The arrangement seemed simple enough: “If I could advance the deposits for units 5F and PH1B she would pay me back as soon as possible after the closing,” according to Stern’s affidavit.

To prove her wealth, Stern wrote, Nelson pulled up a Bank of America account on her computer screen that she claimed was hers. The balance: $40 million—proceeds, she told him, from her crypto and Bitcoin trades. Convinced, Stern released the funds. In June 2022, Nelson attended the closing for the smaller condo.

Then things swiftly went south. Nelson failed to wire the funds when the paperwork was completed and blew off her scheduled closing for the penthouse unit altogether, Stern would later allege in court. Meanwhile, her stories and excuses, Brown recalls, started to make no sense. She claimed she was deferring her acceptance to Harvard Business School—something Brown says “one doesn’t do.” Then there was the ailing, wealthy husband no one could find and the crypto trades no one understood.

That same year, Netflix released Inventing Anna, a dramatic series about fraudster Anna Delvey, who had conned Manhattan’s elite. Privately, those around Nelson and Stern began to wonder if she was cut from the same cloth. “The stories just got weirder,” Brown says. “All of it stopped making sense. Her relationship with Alec was deteriorating. We kind of joked, ‘Is this Inventing Andi?’”

Andi Nora Nelson’s Facebook profile picture from 2018. / Screenshot

Even from childhood, Nelson had always wanted to leave her hometown of Memphis for Boston, her best friend Aliyah Warren has said. The two met in 2016 while taking classes at a Memphis ballet school—Nelson was 15, Warren was 13. Warren has recalled her as kind, respectful, and friendly, noting to MassLive that “If I told my mom Andi wants to pick me up, she’d just let me go, because she knew I was with Andi, and we were safe.”

Already, Nelson had a taste for the finer things—Gucci and other high-end
designers. She had a strained relationship with her mother and a distant father, according to Warren, and a pattern that would prove telling: She dated older men, mostly in their twenties and thirties. When Nelson graduated from high school, she immediately left Memphis to travel the country, ultimately landing in Boston. She called herself an entrepreneur, but beyond that, Warren didn’t know what she did for work.

Warren wasn’t the only one in the dark about Nelson’s professional and financial past. Just before the holidays at the end of 2022, Angelini sent Nelson a text message warning her that she was in default on unit 5F and would lose her deposit and possibly face other legal ramifications—something the agent said she had never dealt with before in her career.

“Ugh,” the exasperated agent texted.

“I honestly don’t care about $85k,” Nelson wrote back, according to exhibits filed in court.

By early 2023, Nelson had reneged on both sales, stiffing her real estate attorney and leaving the two agents without their commissions after they had spent what Brown said was “hundreds of hours” with Nelson. “She is a complete con creator,” Brown said. “It was devastating to a lot of people.” Angelini agreed, saying that just thinking about her encounters with Nelson left her “with knots in my stomach.”

Eventually, Seaport 150 LLC, the parent company of the development, filed a lawsuit against Nelson in January 2024. By then, Nelson had seemingly left Boston, as process servers tried to hunt her down, sending certified letters to her Tennessee address, but she never responded. (Stern also tried to recoup the hundreds of thousands of dollars he claimed he lent Nelson, but he never got his money back. He filed a lawsuit in August 2025 naming both Nelson and Seaport 150 LLC as defendants, though the claim against Seaport 150 LLC was later dismissed.)

The lawsuit wasn’t the only trouble she ran into. On a Saturday afternoon in early September 2023, Stern dialed 911 from his Back Bay home. When officers arrived at the brownstone, Stern told them he wanted Nelson removed from his apartment. “Nelson had been breaking things at his home,” a police report reads, adding that she had recently “thrown a television remote at him but missed.” Stern admitted that she had lived there with him as his girlfriend in the past, but today their relationship was over—he only let her move back in because “she had nowhere else to go.” He also told officers that she owed him $300,000 and that she had taken his dog out with her, without his permission, when she went drinking.

When officers questioned Nelson, she had her own story, according to police reports. She told them she was originally from Dallas, Texas, and claimed that her father had given her money to pay rent to Stern. Stern, she said, had even traveled to Texas to convince her father to allow her to move to Boston. She denied having any altercations with Stern and said “she was under the impression that nothing was wrong” with their relationship.

With that, the officers’ hands were tied. Under Massachusetts law, Nelson had established residency at the brownstone, and there was nothing they could do without evidence of the physical assault—the hurled television remote—that Stern said had happened weeks earlier. Before leaving, officers handed Stern information about domestic abuse law and told him to go to housing court if he wanted Nelson evicted.

They would soon be back. Two days after the incident, Stern would later tell police, Nelson had a terrifying look in her eye as she clenched her fists and declared that she wanted to kill him. According to the police report, when Stern told her he was going to install security cameras, he says she told him that they wouldn’t protect him.

Things would only get worse in the coming weeks. A month after the officers’ first visit to his home, Stern made another 911 call for a domestic violence incident in progress just after 3 a.m. This time, two units arrived with four officers.

According to the police report, Stern said that Nelson had been out drinking, and when she returned home, she began pounding on his locked bedroom door, attempting to talk to him. When he opened the door and asked her when she planned to move out, she flew into a rage, “breaking items” and shoving him before retreating to her room. When officers went to find Nelson, they discovered her “sleeping in her bed with the lights on,” with broken glass on the floor and vomit beside the bed. They called EMS as Nelson roused from sleep.

What happened next was chaos. When Nelson woke up, she was wild, screaming at them to leave, and bolted from the room toward Stern on the first floor. The officers said she was “extremely uncooperative,” and they were forced to restrain her for her own safety—and theirs. “At one point,” the police report states, she “attempted to bite one of the officers.”

When EMS arrived, Nelson continued to fight, “thrashing and kicking,” the report says, so paramedics restrained her to a medical sled to get her out safely. The entire struggle was captured on police bodycam video, including an injury an officer sustained during the melee.

Police issued an involuntary mental health commitment and sent Nelson to Boston Medical Center for a psychiatric evaluation. That morning, after hours in the hospital, she was discharged and placed under arrest, charged with assault on a family or household member and assault and battery on a police officer. She was arraigned and ordered held on $500 bail. After her arraignment, Nelson was allowed to make a phone call. She dialed someone she knew would help her.

By the end of the day on October 11, 2023, according to court records, Joseph Donohue arrived at the clerk’s office with cash in hand to bail her out.

Officers found Nora Nelson, a young woman he was involved with, on his boat with his body. / Libby O’Neill / Pool

The Charlestown Marina is a tight-knit floating neighborhood with small-town vibes, where liveaboards and boat owners enjoy dock parties, barbecues, and dinners shared on neighbors’ decks. Pretty much everyone there knew Donohue.

Donohue and his ex-wife had three successful adult children, and even after their relationship fell apart, they remained close enough to share custody of Eddie every other weekend. Donohue accepted much of the blame for his marriage falling apart, citing his hard-drinking past. “He loved his family very much. He always wanted to be there for them because he had let them down in the past,” says Donohue’s friend and longtime marina neighbor Greg Poirier. (The names of Donohue’s ex-wife and children have been withheld at their request due to the trauma of the murder.)

Donohue’s hairdresser, Emily Hernandez, remembers him fondly—an incorrigible flirt who was forever inviting her to his houseboat. He was semi-retired after decades as an insurance and malpractice lawyer, but his life was far from early-bird specials and AARP discounts. “He was fun and definitely liked to have a good time,” she said.

He was also devoted to his terrier, she recalls, even bringing him to haircut appointments. Donohue had rescued him from a client in a criminal case who belonged to a biker gang. The biker had called him Tramp, but Donohue renamed him Champ, making him the unofficial marina mascot.

Champ was always at Donohue’s side, and Poirier remembers when the dog accidentally fell into the harbor. Without hesitation, Donohue jumped into the freezing, oil-slicked waters to slash him.

Animals weren’t the only beneficiaries of Donohue’s generosity. “He felt like he had done some bad things in his past because of his drinking,” Poirier said. “And he always had the attitude that he was going to do whatever he could for anybody, anytime. He was always trying to do something for somebody else.”

There was the pro bono work from his little office on Shipway Place, volunteer hours at the Pine Street Inn, helping other alcoholics get sober. He lent his rubber dinghy to anyone wanting to explore the Harbor Islands and gave away free Red Sox tickets when he couldn’t attend.

Then there was Nelson. How or where they met remains unclear, as does when he welcomed her into his marina life, where she became a familiar sight on his boat and by his side. The nature of their relationship—“intimate,” as Nelson’s lawyer would later describe it—is equally murky. But there was one clear intersection in their lives: Nelson had worked as a stripper at the Golden Banana, according to an employee there. That same employee and a bartender confirmed that Donohue was a recognizable customer.

Regardless of how they met, when Nelson needed bail money, Donohue was there for her. Had he not helped her, she might have remained behind bars—instead of answering the door on his boat that bitter-cold night when police came calling.

Nelson had worked as a stripper at the Golden Banana, according to an employee there.

Courtesy of the Donohue family (Joseph Donohue); Pool (Nora Nelson)

Once officers discovered Donohue’s body on the Alinea, the desolate marina transformed into a frenzied crime scene. Strobing blue and white lights pierced the darkness while radio traffic and voices from multiple units shattered the silence.

Paramedics examined the body and, according to the police report, “declared the victim non viable” at 11:52 p.m. Meanwhile, Nelson was secured by responding officers and transported to the police station, where she was Mirandized. When homicide detectives questioned her, her answers, according to police, continued in riddles.

What’s your name?

“Mary.”

Mary what?

“Catherine.”

Is there a last name?

“Howard.”

She dodged their questions and “feigned knowing the whereabouts of the resident Joseph Donohue,” according to the police report. As detectives took photos of her hands as evidence, they noticed her “artificial pink fingernails” were “chipped and broken.”

Within hours, Nelson’s true identity told a different story entirely. The woman who had spun tales of Harvard Business School and cryptocurrency millions had been charged with assault and battery in Tennessee and had a warrant out for her arrest in Texas for allegedly resisting arrest and providing a false ID.

As the investigation deepened, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden laid out the case against Nelson in court documents. On January 31, security cameras captured Donohue returning to his houseboat. Nelson was the only other person seen boarding the boat afterward.

So far there is little information available about what motive Nelson would have had to murder the man who took her in. But Donohue’s autopsy revealed the savage nature of the attack. Donohue had “suffered from approximately 67 stab wounds of varying depth and severity,” according to Hayden’s account of the case. More chilling still, investigators found “a small triangular piece of a knife [located] in his forehead.” A dive team also recovered the rest of the suspected murder weapon “in the water outside the kitchen window of the houseboat.” Two “faux pink fingernails” were also found on Donohue’s body.

Months later, when the grand jury convened, they indicted Nelson for first-degree murder, plus charges for the willful and malicious killing of an animal and animal cruelty. Nelson has pleaded not guilty. On September 9, however, she pleaded guilty to assault and battery for her October altercation with Stern.

Emily Hernandez, Donohue’s hairdresser, believes she knows why his killer decided to kill Champ, too—the dog paid the ultimate cost for the man who had rescued him. “That dog definitely would have tried to protect Joe,” she said. Reflecting on her client’s generous nature and tragic end, she paused. “Taking in stray women and stray dogs—that sure sounds like Joe.”